Meddling officials ruining the game

There is a good story, probably apocryphal, concerning Seb Coe and a Chelsea gateman. Coe had turned up for a match at Stamford Bridge as a guest of chairman Ken Bates. At the gate he was asked for his ticket. "Well, I've been personally invited by the chairman," Coe explained. "This is the members' entrance," the gateman replied. "Public entrance is round the far side." Eventually, an exasperated Coe said: "Look, d'you know who I am?" "Nah," said the gateman. "I'm Sebastian Coe." "Well," retorted the gateman, "you'll get round there a bit quicker then!"

We used to laugh about petty officialdom and the mindless obstructiveness of jobsworths, but after the fiasco at Saturday's World Cup final, it has gone beyond a joke.

The problem is that officials have developed a disturbing habit of ruining major events with their law-obsessed meddling. At a packed Oval in 2005 there was the charade of England having to wait half an hour in the dressing room after the Australia batsmen had accepted the offer of the light, before the umpires, Rudi Koertzen and Billy Bowden, deigned to come back out to ostentatiously remove the bails, declaring that England had reclaimed the Ashes. Then, last August at the Oval, there was the unedifiying sight of Darrell Hair apprehending the Pakistanis for alleged ball-tampering and later taking umbrage and his bat and ball home with him when they staged a protest.

As a cricket-mad Hollywood light wrote in an email to me: "For those of us who love the game, it is beyond agonising to watch it systematically being ruined by small-minded, over-literal, bean-counting umpires and officials. It's entertainment, not a bankers' convention!!"

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Exactly. As usual the people who really suffer are the paying public who are utterly disregarded in this pursuit of legal untouchability. So much for the 'Spirit of Cricket' preamble to the Laws of Cricket. Where's the 'spirit' in all of this?

There are those purists who still believe that the umpire's decision is final and that their authority is being undermined by more and more recourse to TV arbitration. To which I would argue that it is time to further dilute the umpires' power at international level. Too many of them are over-concerned with the letter of the law and seem unable to apply practical interpretations.

To offer another example, the third day of an Old Trafford Test coincided with England v Denmark in the 2002 football World Cup. The outfield was a touch damp in one or two areas near the boundary, but instead of giving the spectators 90 minutes' cricket before they all decamped to the car park to watch big-screen coverage of the football, the umpires delayed the start until the time the football kicked off. It was utter nonsense. The recent past is littered with such incidents.

Where are the match referees in all this? Frankly, what is the point of them if they can't assume control in delicate situations? The trouble is, too many of them have been on a jolly for too long and are not properly versed in the playing conditions. Mike Procter is a great ambassador for cricket but was left flailing around by Hair's insistent stance at the Oval, and Jeff Crowe has accepted blame for his mistakes in Barbados. Match referees should be better trained to become the ultimate arbiters.

The elite umpires panel contains some fine officials and meets regularly for consultations. One of their most recent seminars was entitled 'communication and teamwork'. They should have another labelled 'tact and diplomacy' pronto, and be encouraged to get out more. Additionally, MCC should draft a new regulation for the game under the heading - Law 43: the Application of Common Sense.

• Apologies for wrongly describing Surrey's James Benning as a left-hander yesterday. This was an in-house error.